


everything the water touches

by Shinybug



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, M/M, True Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:34:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25976023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shinybug/pseuds/Shinybug
Summary: A rainstorm, a revelation.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 26
Kudos: 242





	everything the water touches

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Alexia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alexia/gifts).



> For Alexia, because I can deny her nothing.

Nicky’s still lighting the candles when Joe pushes into the room bearing humid heat and the scent of creosote ahead of him. Joe pauses before closing the door and dropping his keys on the entry table. “My love,” he says, eyeing the candles and lifting the plastic bag, “it’s only chimichangas. You shouldn’t have.”

“The power’s out,” Nicky replies, as though he’s not having a crisis of revelation right now, as though the world hasn’t just opened below him, a deep chasm. Rain is sparkling in Joe’s dark hair, his forearms, the soft inner bend of his elbow. Everywhere.

Joe raises his eyebrows and grins, and Nicky wants to touch his mouth. After a moment of silence Joe’s smile falters. “What is it?” he asks, and Nicky just shakes his head.

“Nothing, it’s nothing,” he says, like it would be taken at face value. Like he could hide anything from Joe after all this time. He takes the bag and retreats to the kitchen. The saltillo tiles under his bare feet are cool, a strange contrast with the consuming heat outside that presses into the house. “Just hungry.”

He takes the styrofoam cartons from the bag and sets them out on the table, trying to busy himself with the placement of plastic forks and thin paper napkins. He has trouble looking at Joe, even when Joe touches his shoulder, drops a kiss on the nape of his neck. His beard leaves rain on Nicky’s skin.

“Doesn’t seem like nothing,” Joe murmurs, and there’s a low rumble of thunder in the distance that hums in the window glass. “Did something happen? Did Andy call?”

Nicky shakes his head and leans back, resting his shoulder blades against Joe’s chest, helpless. Joe’s rain-speckled arms come around him, and he can feel Joe’s consternation even without seeing his face. He can’t stop thinking about that fragile (not fragile) spot in the bend of his elbow, that stretch of smooth skin and blue veins. Has he kissed that spot enough? He can’t remember. He knows what it tastes like, what it feels like against his mouth, but has he kissed it _enough_?

He pushes back and away, and Joe stumbles. Nicky looks at him, at the half of his face that’s angled gray with the very last light of the clouded evening, and the half that’s glowing golden from the candles. Joe’s eyes are wary in a way Nicky rarely sees, especially aimed at him. He steps in close, brushing that mouth he knows so well with his own. Joe receives his kiss carefully.

“Let’s wait on dinner,” he says against Joe’s lips, and his voice doesn’t shake at all.

Joe holds his cheeks in his warm hands. “I thought you were hungry.”

“I lied,” he replies, not meeting Joe’s eyes.

A beat of silence. “You never lie to me.”

Nicky bites his own lip. “It’s only dinner.” He kisses Joe again and finally he kisses back, unable as always to deny Nicky, or perhaps himself. “Really.”

“You’ll tell me later?” Joe whispers against his cheek.

“I’ll tell you later,” Nicky replies, and something eases in his chest. He pulls Joe’s damp shirt over his head and rain sprinkles down from his hair. His shirt carries the scent of creosote, of the desert rain. He half expects Joe’s skin to taste sweet when he slides his mouth over the pulse in his neck, but he only tastes salty and familiar. Joe’s quickened breath, just the slightest hitch in his chest, seems loud in the room, and the only other sound is the rain on the kitchen window.

The rumpled sheets are briefly cool but the heat is heavy in the air between them. Joe presses him down into the bed like he’s done a million times, ten million, never enough. It still makes his heart race like the first time. He keeps waiting for the day that it will become mundane, prosaic. It has never happened, not in a thousand years.

He’s not the romantic of the two of them, but he wishes he’d thought to light a candle in the bedroom so he could better see Joe’s face, see the broad curl of his shoulders as he braces himself above Nicky’s body. Joe takes him gently but Nicky wants it like the first time, desperate and shocked, all-consuming, so he surges up and bites at Joe’s mouth, tightening his legs around Joe’s hips. Joe, startled, gives an extra hard thrust and Nicky throws his head back.

“Like that,” he moans, digging his fingers into Joe’s back. There is a brief illumination of white and then thunder echoes outside, but it feels far away. They’re locked in a rhythm that only gets faster, a burn that only gets brighter.

“What you do to me,” Joe whispers, his breath ragged. “I’d give you anything, everything.”

_You have,_ Nicky thinks, but his throat is choked by fear and love and nothing but a gasp comes as a reply.

Afterwards they lie together, barely touching. The air is damp and the thunder still trembles in the air outside, but Nicky can hear that the storm is moving off, that the torrent of rain is lessening where they are and carrying its burden to another place. The dry rivers are rushing now, even though he can’t see them. The water leaves scars on the earth.

“I thought you might not come back to me,” Nicky says, and Joe brushes his knuckles with warm fingertips.

“I only went for dinner.” He sounds amused but it rings false in Nicky’s ears.

“Andy was invincible until she wasn’t.”

Joe slowly leans up on his elbow and stares at Nicky. “It’s not my time,” he says, and Nicky expects Joe to kiss him, to pacify him, but he doesn’t.

“You don’t know that.” Nicky has to clear his throat so the words come out recognizable. “We won’t go together.”

“I’m not ready to die any more than you are,” Joe says, hushed, intent. “What brought this on? Why now?”

He closes his eyes briefly and skims his fingers over Joe’s brow. “I was thinking about the last time we were here, that Nogales job with Andy, that monsoon. When everything went sideways. I think Booker was in Brussels. Was that fifty years ago? Sixty?”

“Sixty,” Joe replied, his brow furrowed.

Nicky stares at the ceiling fan, its stopped blades waiting for the return of power to the house. He knows his thoughts are disjointed, his reasons obscure. “She could be dead now, and we wouldn’t know. She’s fragile. I don’t remember what that’s like.”

Joe is silent, watching him in the near darkness. “Neither do I,” he finally whispers.

“I can barely remember a time when you weren’t here. The time before.”

Finally Joe leans down to kiss him, and Nicky knows it is to stop his mouth. “I’m still here.”

Nicky pushes him over and straddles his hips. He trails his fingertips over roughened chest hair, the warm unblemished skin of his sides, the curve of his biceps. He leans down and presses his lips to the bend of Joe’s elbow, that fragile (not fragile) place that calls to him, running over it with his tongue, tasting the salt that gathers there in the heat. Is that enough? It will never be, he knows.

_Don’t ever go where I can’t follow,_ he tries to say, but it only comes out as a long breath against Joe’s skin. “Yusuf,” he whispers, pressing his forehead to Joe’s collarbone, and Joe’s hand comes up to cradle his skull. After all this time, he believes that Joe knows what he means, and the smoothing of Joe’s fingers down the nape of his neck is all the reply he needs.


End file.
